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Education and Skills Bill

moved Amendment No. 230C: 230C: After Clause 139, insert the following new Clause— ““Traveller Education Services It shall be the duty of all local education authorities to establish a traveller education service which shall be resourced in proportion to the population of gypsies and travellers identified in the Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessments required under the Housing Act 2004 (c. 34).”” The noble Lord said: The proposed new clause makes it obligatory for all local authorities to establish a Traveller education service in proportion to their population of Gypsies and Travellers. I understand that all except eight or 10 LEAs do this already. Those that do not may claim not to have any Gypsies or Travellers in their area, but when the regional planning boards have completed their study of the Gypsy and Traveller accommodation assessments and allocated the number of extra pitches needed to eliminate homelessness shown by that exercise to individual authorities, with an obligation to provide the necessary land in their local development frameworks, there will be some balancing between authorities that have always had large numbers of Gypsies and those few which have managed to avoid having any. The formula in this amendment would still allow for the possibility that an LEA had no Gypsies or Travellers in its area, because the authority would then not have to devote any resources to its Traveller education service. The proposed new clause gives us the opportunity of exploring the hope of how the Government intend to apply the provisions of Part 1 to Gypsies and Travellers and how the TES will be involved in that process. Obviously we approve of the raising of the education leaving age to 18 for Gypsies and Travellers as for all others, but there needs to be some flexibility in how that is done, and I am not happy about the idea that non-compliance would lead to prosecution of Gypsies and Travellers. There should be support for improving, increasing and resourcing all manner of educational and training opportunities for 16 to 18 year-olds, and encouraging and supporting access to these opportunities, but this can and should be done without compulsion and criminalisation. In the Gypsy and Traveller community, many women marry at age 16 or 17 and become mothers in the first year or two of marriage. They should have the legal right to make that decision. If they can be offered outreach education, particularly in skills that are relevant to parenting, that should be the alternative to attendance at education or training sessions at a distant college and the need to leave a small child in the care of someone else. We ought to acknowledge that work in the home, particularly work as a mother, is every bit as valuable as work outside the home. Raising the next generation of citizens and workers is an honourable and very demanding occupation and should be recognised as such. We welcome the assurance given on Second Reading by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, when she noted, "““that young people’s lives do not run along the lines designed by civil servants … and in some cases it may be difficult or even impossible for a young person to participate””." She added: "““The focus will be on the need to provide help and support, and first to address barriers by tailoring programmes to aid the progress of young people back into learning in a way that is right for them””.—[Official Report, 10/6/08; col. 557.]" That is the right approach for Gypsies and Travellers, and it will be a far more effective way of increasing participation in secondary as well as further education than compulsion. We need to remove the barriers of bullying and racism that deter Gypsies and Travellers from attendance and contribute to their low attendance record from the beginning of secondary education onwards, and not just in the 16 to 18 age range. At the same time we need more research on the motivation of the community and the factors that would encourage them towards higher levels of participation. Until these problems are addressed, raising the school leaving age is not only meaningless but counterproductive because it will be one more source of confrontation between them and the authorities. We very much welcomed the letter that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, sent to directors of local authority children’s services in November 2006, in which he set out many of the problems faced by Gypsy and Traveller children in the education system. He suggested some very sensible solutions. Unfortunately, as he recalls, there was a poor response from local authorities, which is an indication of how low Gypsies and Travellers are in the priorities of most local authorities. The DCSF had to nag many of them just to get any sort of reply at all, and many of the answers that finally came were from Traveller education services, suggesting that local authorities felt that other departments need not be involved. The experience of the London Gypsy and Traveller Unit is that there has been no strategy in Hackney and Haringey, the two boroughs where it works, to provide adequate, useful vocational training for the 14 to16 year-olds whom the Government recognised were not benefiting from school. The LGTU provides some life skills and vocational training tasters for 14 to 19 year-olds, but is dependent on short-term funding. So how is adequate, useful vocational training to be provided under the Bill for 16 year-olds from Gypsy and Travellers communities? If there has been no strategy on how to assist hard-to-reach 14 to 16 year-olds, there can be no confidence that extending the age range is going to add to the educational opportunities for Gypsies and Travellers. Those youngsters who have not already benefited from current education provision simply will not comply with any obligation to participate in education or training after their 16th year and will then be needlessly criminalised. Should not powers of compulsion be withheld from local authorities until they have clearly demonstrated that they have a full and varied programme of appropriate education and training opportunities for Gypsies and Travellers that can be flexibly delivered? Following a helpful meeting that the Minister had last November with representatives of the National Association of Teachers of Travellers and the Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and other Travellers, he wrote to me about the efforts being made to get back into education the 12,000 GRT secondary-age children who were out of school according to an Ofsted survey of 2003. It would be useful to know how many children are back in the educational system. What estimate can the DCSF make of the proportion that is still missing? The Bill imposes a duty on local authorities to assess the training needs of young people with special educational needs. There is a case for extending that duty to all young people marginalised and disadvantaged within the education system, including Gypsies and Travellers in particular. The Traveller education service would be the key to this assessment, just as it has been crucial in providing consistent long-term data over the 35 years that it has been working with Gypsies and Travellers. It will need to be properly resourced if it is to promote post-16 and vocational training; and where elective home education is the option, as it often is in secondary education, to provide support to ensure that proper standards are maintained. The DCSF decided not to do anything about elective home education apart from issuing guidance that has nothing useful to say about how local authorities should monitor the delivery of education by Traveller parents, who are generally not professionally capable of providing a ““suitable and efficient”” education for their children. Very few members of the public know about the raising of the compulsory education leaving age, and Gypsies and Travellers in particular were completely unaware of a proposal that could disproportionately impact on their lives if there is not the necessary preparation. The first step is to ensure that the Traveller education service covers the whole country so that the communities have access to the full range of education wherever they are. However, the Traveller Law Reform Project suggests, as the Minister is aware, that the DCSF should offer to provide a forum that is similar to the successful forum initiated by the DCLG on Traveller accommodation issues in which Travellers and practitioners can regularly meet DCSF officials. I believe that there have been helpful noises from the Minister on this, but it would be useful to have them on the record. I beg to move.